#Neanderthal genome to be unveiled: Nature News The entire genome of a 38,000-year-old Neanderthal has been sequenced by a team of scientists in Germany.
The group is already extracting DNA from other ancient Neanderthal bones and hopes that the genomes will allow an unprecedented comparison between modern humans and their closest evolutionary relative.
The three-year project, which cost about#5 million (US$6. 4 million), was carried out at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig.
computational biologist Richard Green, is coordinating the analysis of the genome's 3 billion base pairs.
Comparisons with the human genome may uncover evidence of interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans, the genomes
The genome may also deliver more details about how these species developed their different physical traits,
"says Edward Rubin, director of the US Joint Genome Institute in Walnut creek, California, which is also sequencing Neanderthal DNA
Almost all of the Neanderthal genome to be unveiled in Chicago comes from DNA extracted from a single bone originally discovered in a cave near Vindija in Croatia.
and so is well on the way to creating a library of Neanderthal genomes that would allow stronger comparisons with modern humans.
Pääbo says that his group will publish a first draft of the entire Neanderthal genome later this year,
However, some published human genomes had all their base pairs read eight to ten times before publication.
The team says that its single-read of the Neanderthal genome is sufficient for publication
Work by two independent groups will make it easier to find out the structure of single biological molecules such as proteins without destroying
Within these exosomes is genetic information that can be analyzed to determine the cancer s molecular composition and state of progression.
Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital discovered that exosomes preserve the genetic information of their parent cells in 2008
He is one of the lead researchers in a multicenter clinical study using new exosomal diagnostic tests developed by New york city-based Exosome Diagnostics to identify a genetic mutation found exclusively in glioma, the most common form of brain cancer.
Once the specific cancer mutation is identified, clinicians will periodically draw additional bio-fluids to monitor the mutation levels to determine
whether a patient is responding to therapy. Whereas Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a useful tool, tumors only show up on imaging scans once they are at least one millimeter in diameter
"On the other hand, having an easily accessible biomarker for glioma would give you a clear response. There are 18 U s. hospitals participating in the clinical trial,
says Sudhir Srivastava, head of the National Cancer Institute s Cancer Biomarkers Research Group.""Exosomes could be very much more cancer specific.
PSA might give you one specific biomarker for cancer identification, but exosomes can give you an entire disease specific profile
Researchers use the kit to look for the genetic biomarker TMPRSS2: ERG or T: E in exosomes taken from a urine sample.
and also has biomarkers which are positive in exosomes that would be a great test,
They will be awarded every two years starting in 2014, to global leaders in the fields of sustainable development, biopharmaceutical science, Chinese studies and the rule of law.
researchers warn in a study due to appear in the journal Biological Conservation1. Known as Himalayan Viagra'because of its supposed libido-boosting powers,
says one of the study s co-authors, Kamaljit Bawa, a conservation biologist at the University of Massachusetts in Boston.
but the impact on biodiversity and ecosystems has received little attention until now, says Bawa. Native to the meadows of The himalayas and Tibetan plateau at 3
India and Bhutan, says Liu Xingzhong, a mycologist in the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Microbiology in Beijing.
from sequencing its genome to crossbreeding coffee plants with resistant strains. Caused by the fungus Hemileia vastatrix,
The government has supported also work on the genetics of both the fungus and the plant. Research programmes have started in other countries, too.
And in the United kingdom, Harry Evans is working on the genome of H.#vastatrix at CABI in Egham.
In one of the first attempts to explore atmospheric microbiology at high altitude, researchers analysed air samples from a six-week hurricane-research mission by NASA in 2010.
bacteria accounted for around 20%of all particles#biological and non-biological#a higher proportion than in the near-Earth atmosphere."
says Ulrich Karlson, an environmental microbiologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, who was involved not in the study."
says Konstantinos Konstantinidis, an environmental microbiologist at the Georgia Institute of technology in Atlanta and one of the study's authors.
Genetic analysis revealed that some microbes in the upper atmosphere are thought related to bacteria to catalyse ice-crystal formation and cloud condensation2.
led by Nick Goldman of the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) at Hinxton, UK, marks another step towards using nucleic acids as a practical way of storing information#one that is more compact and durable than current media such as hard disks or magnetic tape.#"
says George Church a molecular geneticist at Harvard Medical school in Boston, Massachusetts, who encoded a draft of his latest book in DNA last year2."
Yoshiki Sasai, who has been wowing biologists and non-scientists alike by growing rudimentary retinas, brain parts and other tissues from stem cells (see Nature 488,444-446;
2012), has long been negotiating with the government for facilities to link basic research at the Center for Developmental biology in Kobe, where he works, with clinics and industry.
mainly to support Masayo Takahashi, who works next door at the Center for Developmental biology. Takahashi is planning the first trial of ips cells in humans,
says Anura Rambukkana, a regeneration biologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who led the study.
and metabolic diseases, says Sheng Ding, a stem-cell biologist at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular disease in San francisco, California.
researchers have been trying to understand just how similar they are to ES cells. ips cells begin with different patterns of gene expression,
and they can also acquire mutations during the reprogramming process, which means that every ips cell must be evaluated thoroughly before it can be used in any study."
April 2009 Paper reports successful derivation of human ips cells without the integration of genetic information into the cell genome.
October 2010 Biotechnology company Geron doses first patient in world s first clinical trial to test an ES-cell product.
Former heads of the biotech company Geron, based in Menlo Park, California, last week announced an agreement to acquire stem-cell assets including the company s flagship human ES-cell trial, in
California, began selling them to cell biologists, who prize them as fluorescent imaging labels for proteins and other biological molecules.
As recently as 2010, the biomedical sector was responsible for US$48#million of $67#million in total quantum dot revenues, according to BCC Research of Wellesley, Massachusetts.
#Genomes link Aboriginal australians to Indians Some Aboriginal australians can trace as much as 11%of their genomes to migrants who reached the island around 4, 000 years ago from India,
This scenario is the result of a large genetic analysis outlined today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
says Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany,
Irina Pugach, a postdoctoral researcher in Stoneking s laboratory, discovered signs of the Indian migration by comparing genetic variation across the entire genomes of 344 individuals, including Aboriginal australians from the Northern territory, highlanders
Pugach confirmed an ancient association between the genomes of Australians New Guineans and the Mamanwa#a Negrito group from the Philippines.
because it is absent from New Guinean and Mamanwa genomes, and it is too uniformly spread across the northern Aboriginal genomes to have come from European colonists.
The genetic mingling coincided with the arrival in Australia of microliths#small stone tools that formed the tips of weapons
and not anything like the dense, genome-wide study we carried out. A few smaller studies of MITOCHONDRIAL DNA and the Y chromosome have hinted at recent gene flow between India and Australia2, 3,
but a genome-wide study in 2010 missed it by not including any Indian populations4,
and a project that sequenced a full Aboriginal genome dismissed signs of gene flow from India as a spurious result5.
Sheila van Holst Pellekaan, a geneticist at the University of New south wales, Australia, and a co-author of the earlier genome-wide study,
welcomes the latest research, but warns that the finding is"definitely not representative of Australia,
But a legacy of distrust of biological research among aboriginal groups means that genetic studies are viewed suspiciously
the sulphur-assisted amino acid transfer is found elsewhere in biology: some bacteria rely on it to synthesize proteins.
"It s laborious and not as effective as biology, says Leigh. Leigh and other chemists have used already rotaxanes to move droplets of fluid around2;
Molecular machines inspired by biology could eventually enable chemists to build materials with a specific sequence of molecules#a strand of polystyrene in which each component bears one of a range of extra chemical groups, for example.
"That s how biology does it, so why can t we? asks Leigh s
#Nearby star is almost as old as the Universe Astronomers have discovered a Methuselah of stars#a denizen of the Solar system's neighbourhood that is at least 13.2 billion years old and formed shortly after the Big bang."
It was in August 2009, that Sherley and Theresa Deisher, the chief executive of AVM Biotechnology in Seattle,
#Flesh-eating flies map forest biodiversity The blowflies and flesh flies that settle on dead animals aren't just feasting on the carrion#they're sampling their DNA.
but soon realized"that detecting mammal DNA from flies could also be an extremely cool tool for assessing biodiversity,
says team leader S#bastien Calvignac-Spencer, an evolutionary biologist at the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin.#
a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen who last year showed3 that leeches can also preserve the DNA of the animals they feed on.
#Circular RNAS throw genetics for a loop Behold the latest curio in the cabinet of RNA oddities:
naturally occurring circular RNA molecules that influence gene expression. At least some of the loops, described in two papers published this week by Nature1,
parallel universe of unexplored RNAS, says Nikolaus Rajewsky, the lead author of one of the studies and a systems biologist at the Max Delbr#ck Center for Molecular Medicine in Berlin.
or experimental artefacts, says Erik Sontheimer, a molecular biologist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. Instead,
But advances in sequencing have allowed biologists to accumulate large data sets of RNA sequences including some from RNA without tails.
Last year, Julia Salzman, a molecular biologist at Stanford university School of medicine in California, and her colleagues sent the first missive from the circular universe.
They found that it contains about 70 binding sites for a microrna called mir-7. Micrornas are short fragments of RNA that can block gene expression by binding to
"I can t think of another form we might have missed, laughs Phillip Sharp, a molecular biologist at the Massachusetts institute of technology in Cambridge."
a biologist and open-access advocate at the University of California, Berkeley, says that he is disappointed."
Biophysicist Dennis Discher, who led the work, says that he was inspired when he saw another group's work describing the structure of CD47."
#How to turn living cells into computers Synthetic biologists have developed DNA modules that perform logic operations in living cells.
Synthetic biology seeks to bring concepts from electronic engineering to cell biology, treating gene functions as components in a circuit.
a synthetic biologist at Boston University in Massachusetts who was involved not in the study. Collins developed the genetic toggle switch that helped to kick-start the field of synthetic biology more than a decade ago2.
A wide range of computational circuits for cells have been developed since, including a simple counter that Collins
a synthetic biologist at MIT who led the latest research.""We wanted to show you can assemble a bunch of simple parts in a very easy fashion to give you many types of logical functions.
Christopher Voigt, a synthetic biologist also at MIT, calls the artificial modules"a very digital and permanent way to store information in DNA.
#which would be important for a biologist wanting to record key moments in a cell s ancestry.
Lu says that the approach could also be useful in biotechnology. Using simple forms of these addressable switches,
Linguists routinely construct such trees using techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology. The algorithm can automatically identify cognate words (ones with the same root) in the languages.
using robots to test chemicals for biological activity.""If it really works, it might provide a future model to operate early drug discovery,
is due to gaps in the range of biological targets that industry is pursuing and in the libraries of compounds screened for activity against those targets.
Any academic group or company can also propose assays to test molecules in the library for biological activity.
The hope is that members will build on the results to improve the molecules biological properties
but to identify biological pathways that might make good drug targets. The European initiative, by contrast, aims to propel drug development.
Aled Edwards leads the Structural genomics Consortium at the University of Toronto, Canada, in which some drug companies contribute both chemical analysis and screening support,
So-called"bioprinters naturally use cells rather than plastics to create organic structures. However this technique can damage the printed cells,
any tissue formed would yield better models of human biology than those formed from mouse cells.
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania s Tissue Microfabrication Laboratory, the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative medicine and elsewhere are developing methods for bioengineering functional vessels that could someday be used to ferry blood around 3-D-printed organs.
says Jon Clardy, a biological chemist at Harvard Medical school in Boston, Massachusetts, who was involved not in the work
Ewen Callaway interviews biological chemist Jon Clardy about the significance of the new technique for deciphering molecular structures.
The synthetic shell contains no genetic material and so it cannot infect the animals. But it will spur the immune system to produce antibodies that would protect them from the real virus. In 2001,
says co-author David Stuart, a structural biologist at the University of Oxford, UK, who is working with the World health organization
A team led by biophysicist#Osamu Nureki, of the University of Tokyo, #reports that the membrane-bound protein is shaped like A'v',
Geoffrey Chang, a structural biologist at the University of California, San diego, says that the findings are very similar to those for the MATE protein from Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that causes cholera.
and cancer biologists that this new kind of immunotherapy can work, he says. Oncologist Renier Brentjens, also at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, remembers the day that he had to tell one of the patients in the trial that the weeks of high-dose chemotherapy the 58-year-old man had endured had worked not after all."
as well as the launch of several SMALL CAR-focused biotechnology firms. And Sadelein says that he is an investigator on a trial with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston
Shining a light on the cells triggers a cascade of biochemical reactions that transfer electrons along a chain of molecules#and switches the transistor on.
Other researchers are trying to repurpose the biochemistry of green algae to make biofuels, and Saraf thinks that his device could monitor how efficiently the new strains photosynthesize.
It costs less than US$1, 500 per person to have the important parts of his clients genomes sequenced.
and identify mutations that might be causing the undiagnosed diseases that afflict his clients families.
So Jalas, the centre s director of genetics resources and services, has outsourced parts of the analysis. He uploads his clients sequencing data to cloud-computing software platforms
Jalas and the way he works represent a new and mostly untapped market for a new crop of genetics interpretation and analysis firms,
which will be touting for customers at a meeting of the American College of Medical Genetics and Genomics in Phoenix, Arizona, on 19-23 march.
"It s a huge unmet need, says David Ferreiro, a biotechnology analyst with investment bank Oppenheimer & Company in New york,
which provides genetic analysis software on its cloud-based platform and allows users to upload and run their own algorithms.
aims to be accessible to people with no expertise in bioinformatics, and provides access to free tools for designing custom-made analysis pipelines.
Ingenuity Systems in Redwood City, California, allows users to upload a list of mutations in a person s genome,
Personalis, down the road in Menlo Park, offers sequencing services and interpretation for clinicians and pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
when bioinformaticians started up a flurry of companies, most of which were unsuccessful because the path from a genetic-disease marker to a profitable drug has not been straight#forward.
and clinical geneticists may be uneasy about uploading data to the cloud.""It s your licence and your lab that go on the line
says Elizabeth Worthey, director of genomic informatics at the Human and Molecular genetics Center at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
and is optimized to run genome-analysis software. Knome of Cambridge Massachusetts, announced last year that it plans to sell $125, 000 genome-analysis machines for use in customers labs (see Nature 490,157;
2012). ) It seems unlikely that any single analysis company will rule the market; the range of customers who need to interpret sequence data is growing,
) Craig Smith, a deep-sea biologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, will lead an initial assessment of seafloor life for Lockheed s project, gathering baseline data for the potential harvest zone
says Charles Brown, a biologist at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma and one of the authors of the study.
Yuste has been leading the call for a big biology project2 that would do just that in the human brain,
and assembled the complete genome of the new virus. The virus was found in every one of the eight horses,
dengue fever and hepatitis C. It is associated most closely with a genus of newly discovered viruses called Pegivirus,
but this time,"we had five microbiologists on board, says Lever. The team, which included scientists from six different countries, drilled through 265 metres of sediment
#Wildlife trade meeting endorses DNA TESTING of seized ivory If you go into a bar in Bangkok tonight,
because it was the first time that the entire COP acknowledged the value and need for DNA TESTING for the origin of poached ivory.
says Samuel Wasser, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle and one of the driving forces behind the push for forensic examinations of elephant ivory.
so harder implants that don bend with their surrounding biological environment can easily shift and move to a different area than they were implanted,
Biocompatible: This sort of goes without saying, but anything implanted with the body has to be entirely non-reactive, especially in the brain.
so a polymer that is both flexible and biocompatible is perfect for neural implantation. Multiple functionalities:
Using the brain known connectivity along with detailed biophysics, the researchers reconstruct neuronal activity of the entire cortex in the resting-state.
and responds just like native tissue to external stimuli such as electrical pulses, biochemical signals and pharmaceuticals.
The study was led by Nenad Bursac, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Duke university and Lauran Madden, a postdoctoral researcher in Bursac laboratory.
and also to reproduce the functional and biochemical signals of diseasesspecially rare ones and those that make taking muscle biopsies difficult.
the R. Eugene and Susie E. Goodson Professor of Biomedical engineering and senior associate dean for research for the Pratt School of engineering,
and William Krauss, professor of biomedical engineering, medicine and nursing at Duke university. The research was supported by NIH Grants R01ar055226 and R01ar065873 from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin disease and UH2TR000505 from the NIH Common Fund for the Microphysiological Systems Initiative.
These biomimetic constructs exhibit aligned architecture, multinucleated and striated myofibers, and a Pax7+cell pool.
Now, as part of a joint international project, a team of young researchers at the Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical engineering at Meduni Vienna has succeeded in identifying the mechanisms the spinal cord uses to control this muscle activity.
explains study author Simon Danner, from the Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical engineering of Meduni Vienna.
However, in recent years neuroscientists have shown in animal models that it is possible to reverse the debilitating effects of these gene mutations.
whether different gene mutations disrupt common physiological processes. If this were the case, a treatment developed for one genetic cause of autism
Different genes, same consequences Another cause of autism and intellectual disability is the loss of a series of genes on human chromosome 16,
Current research indicates that well over 100 distinct gene mutations can manifest as intellectual disability and autism.
by removing a biochemical lampthat prevents connections between nerve cells in the brain from growing stronger.
Studies at other institutions have identified mutations in the gene for Syngap associated with autism and intellectual disability.
To see how these mutations affect the protein function the Johns Hopkins research team altered their lab-grown cells
so that they had genes with one of three of these mutations. All three of the disability-associated mutations showed similar effects:
Compared to normal neurons, there was less Syngap in synapses when they were at rest, but activating Camkii did not noticeably change anything. his gives us a much clearer idea of how some Syngap mutations cause problems in the brain,
Huganir says. The findings may one day lead to drugs or other interventions that would lessen the effects of the mutations,
he says. Other authors on the paper are Menglong Zeng and Mingjie Zhang, both of Hong kong University of Science and Technology c
The study, conducted by an international ALS consortium that includes scientists and clinicians from Columbia University Medical center (CUMC), Biogen idec,
and Hudsonalpha Institute for Biotechnology, was published today in the online edition of Science. he identification of TBK1 is exciting for understanding ALS pathogenesis,
but that they can help pinpoint key biological pathways relevant to ALS that then become the focus of targeted drug development efforts,
said study co-leader David B. Goldstein, Phd, professor of genetics and development and director of the new Institute for Genomic medicine at CUMC.
caused by dozens of different genetic mutations, which wee only beginning to discover. The more of these mutations we identify
the better we can deciphernd influencehe pathways that lead to disease. The other co-leaders of the study are Richard M. Myers, Phd, president and scientific director of Hudsonalpha,
and Tim Harris, Phd, DSC, Senior vice president, Technology and Translational Sciences, Biogen idec. hese findings demonstrate the power of exome sequencing in the search for rare variants that predispose individuals to disease and in identifying potential
especially in the context of precision medicine and whole-genome sequencing.""Industry and academia often do things together,
but this is a perfect example of a large, complex project that required many parts, with equal contributions from Biogen idec.
TBK1 mutations appeared in about 1 percent of the ALS patients large proportion in the context of a complex disease with multiple genetic components, according to Dr. Goldstein.
and now we have shown that mutations in either gene are associated with ALS, said Dr. Goldstein. hus there seems to be no question that aberrations in the pathways that require TBK1
and mouse models with mutations in TBK1 or OPTN to study ALS disease mechanisms and to screen for drug candidates.
said Tom Maniatis, Phd, the Isidore S. Edelman Professor, chair of biochemistry and molecular biophysics,
senior researcher at the Department of Medical Biochemistry and Biophysics. ut in recent years wee developed much more sensitive methods of analysis that allow us to see which genes are active in individual cells.
The study was carried out by Sten Linnarsson and Jens Hjerling-Leffler research groups at the department of medical biochemistry and biophysics, in particular by Amit Zeisel and Ana Muños Manchado.
While some recent AD genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which search the entire human genome for small variations,
have suggested that MAPT is associated with increased risk for AD, other studies have found no association.
principal investigator of the Alzheimer Disease Genetics Consortium and a study co-author. n important aspect was the collaborative nature of this work.
Thanks to our collaborators from the Consortium, the International Parkinson Disease Genetics Consortium, the Genetic and Environmental Risk in Alzheimer Disease, the Cohorts for Heart and Aging research in Genomic Epidemiology, decode Genetics and the Demgene cohort,
professor of biological psychiatry at the University of Oslo and a senior co-author. Sudha Seshadri, MD, professor of neurology at the Boston University School of medicine, the principal investigator of the Neurology Working group within the Cohorts for Heart and Aging research in Genomic Epidemiology consortium and a study co-author added:
The recent association of genetic variation in the MAPT gene with AD risk and the emerging availability of tau imaging are now leading to a recognition that perhaps tau changes are key in the pathophysiologic pathway of AD
and quantifying the biochemical effects of therapeutic interventions, said Anders M. Dale, Phd, professor of neurosciences and radiology and director of the Center for Translational Imaging and Precision Medicine at UC San diego and the study senior author e
Overtext Web Module V3.0 Alpha
Copyright Semantic-Knowledge, 1994-2011